End Hits

For those of you new to Fugazi or for those who have only heard the song "Waiting Room" I would not recommend this album to you. I would suggest starting from the beginning with 13 Songs and chronologically progressing forward until you find your favorite niche. Mine is right here with End Hits.

Fugazi's End Hits is truly one of the best albums of all time. With Fugazi it's really listeners choice, in my opinion every album is a classic. To a new comer this album will grow on you like a weed. A beautiful, hard hitting, guitar smashing, bass pumping, lyrically ambigous weed. Cause that's End Hits.

For example, closing track "F/D" appears an appauling closer with it's random parts stitched together somewhat superficially, but after listening to the whole album from the start(try listening to it on a walk in the countryside) the track's anticlimatic nature is what makes it a perfect climax to the album. The opening tracks are explosive and brilliant. "Break"'s rumbling rhythm and stinging guitars are bolstered by it's piano plinks and yelling, and "Place Position" is a tense guy-sung stormer with one of the best riffs ever written by fugazi. Elsewhere, "Five Corporations" is an old-school bohemian mackaye rant, with an excellent call and response between vocals and instruments. "Recap Modotti", "Floating Boy", and "Pink Frosty" are territories to which fugazi has never ventured to before, and as with most experimental music, the results are mixed. Recap has an incredible vocal melody but lacks musical direction, Floating Boy constantly raises the question, "so what?", and Pink Frosty is whispering, haunting, but lacks a climax. "Closed Captioned" is another poor track, which comes out much better in demo form(see the instrument soundtrack). Guilford Fall is disjointed but fantastic, caustic acrostic and no surprise are more typical fugazi moments, with solid verse - chorus transitions. Closing track "F/D" appears an appauling closer with it's random parts stitched together somewhat superficially, but after listening to the whole album from the start(try listening to it on a walk in the countryside) the track's anticlimatic nature is what makes it a perfect climax to the album.

Viewing end hits through it's individual tracks would be a crime, viewing it as a whole document reveals an exciting, at times chilling, experimental take on classic jazz influenced post hardcore as created by fugazi themselves. This is fugazi's most interesting and challenging moment.

There are certainly some good tracks here, particularly "Caustic Acrostic", "Place Position" and "Arpeggiator". The clearer production also allows the interesting instrumentation on "Pink Frosty" to shine through. However, the album is bizarrely disjointed, with lots of stop/start dynamics that mean songs never get off the ground or build to a climax. This problem is worst throughout the second half of the album. "F/D" for example ends the album not with a bang, but a whimper of lo-fi noodling.

If you're looking for the harder Fugazi songs, get Repeater instead, whereas if you're looking for Fugazi songs with more varied instrumentation and polished production, Red Medicine or The Argument are the ones to go for. Maybe I'm being a little hard on End Hits and it needs a lot of listens to sink in, but this is the way I feel about it at the moment.